Creating Your First Repository

A repository (repo) is a folder that stores your files plus the full history of every change — so you can see who changed what, revert, and collaborate cleanly.

Turn any folder into a Git repo with git init, run from inside the project directory. It sets up everything Git needs to start tracking.

git init creates a hidden .git folder — Git’s brain for your project. It holds all metadata and every version of your files, so never edit it by hand.

git status is your go-to: it shows what is new, modified, staged, or untracked. Run it constantly to see exactly where your repo stands.

Git only saves what you tell it to. git add moves files into the staging area — your prepared snapshot for the next commit.

Time to try it: create a folder, run git init, add a file, and check the status. Watch how staging works in your own terminal.

After those commands, git status shows index.html under Changes to be committed — it is staged and ready for its first commit.

Some files never belong in Git: build outputs, logs, secrets. List them in a .gitignore at the repo root and Git will leave them alone.

Inside .gitignore, each line is a pattern: *.log skips all logs, /build/ skips that folder, node_modules/ skips dependencies. Ignored files vanish from git status.

Great start! You used git init to create a repo, learned the .git folder, checked state with git status, staged with git add, and ignored junk via .gitignore.